His hand on the wall. The plaster cool under his palm.
Rory was beside him. He'd seen it. All of it. The hand, the turn, the look, the coat, the buttons. He said nothing, kept his hands away from Neil. He stood at Neil's shoulder and waited.
‘She saw,’ Neil said.
‘Yeah.’
‘She knows.’
‘She's always known, Neil. This was her deciding to stop pretending she didn't.’
The flat was emptying. Gemma was in the garden with Freddie. Owen was stacking chairs. The silence after a children's party, sudden, almost shocking.
‘What happens now?’ Neil asked the hallway. The air.
‘Now,’ Rory said, ‘we clean up. We give Freddie his tea. We get through the evening.’ A pause. ‘And then you decide what you want to do.’
‘I don't know what I want to do.’
‘You do. You've known since September. You just haven't said it out loud yet.’
13
AFTER THE SILENCE
His teeth had been clenchedsince three o'clock. The washing-up had been autopilot. He'd put four things in the wrong cupboard and corrected three of them.
The evening was still. Gemma had taken Freddie to hers for the night, the arrangement made weeks ago. The flat was empty. Clean. The balloons still taped to the walls, the streamers hanging limp, the paper plates in the recycling. The Spider-Man painting on the fridge, held by four magnets because three kept losing their grip.
Rory stayed. As Neil had asked. He didn't push and didn't ask questions. He found the moka pot on Neil's counter and made coffee. The hiss and gurgle filling the flat for the first time here. He handed Neil a cup and sat on the sofa beside him and waited.
The coffee was the same. Dark, the crema intact. The same in his flat as in Rory's.
'Tomorrow. Or Monday. She'll ring and she'll say something constructed to sound like concern. Or she won't ring, which will be worse.'
'What will she say?'
'She won't say gay. She won't say partner or relationship. She'll saythis situation. Oryour choices. Orwhat's best for Freddie. She'll weaponise Freddie because weaponising Freddie means she doesn't have to make it about me. She doesn't have to say: my son is gay and I've known for years and I've been pretending not to know because the pretending was easier than the conversation.'
'How long has she known?'
Neil was quiet for a long time. The coffee cooling between his palms.
'Maybe before I did,' he said. And the sentence, once it was out, surprised him. 'She watched Gemma and me for years. She saw it failing, saw me stop touching my wife, saw the distance grow. And she filed it neatly, silently, in a drawer she never opens. But maybe...' He stopped. Started again. 'I've never told you this. When I was fifteen. There was a Pride march on the local news. Colourful footage, men in shorts, rainbow flags. My father saiddisgraceful. One word. The tone reserved for potholes, benefit fraud. But my mother. She'd reached for the remote before he spoke.Before. She was already changing the channel. Which means she was already watching me. Already reading something in my face that I didn't know was there.'
'Neil.'
'She might have known before the word existed in my head. She might have watched her son draw a boy's shoulders and not know why, and she knew why. And she changed the channel. And she never said a word. Thirty-three years of not saying a word.'
The anger at the coat buttons, at the leaving, at the decades of channel changes, shifted. Made room. The image of his mother at forty, watching her teenage son and recognising what he couldn't see in himself and choosing silence. Out of fear, not cruelty. The same fear Neil had carried for twenty years.
'That's... Christ,' Rory said. Quiet.
'Yeah.'
'That's sad, Neil.'
'She's been carrying it longer than I have. The carrying made her cold. The cold is how she copes.' He paused. 'It doesn't excuse the coat.'
